Combined US News Rankings - National Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges

College Search & Selection
1

<p>I'm not sure if anyone has done this before, but I just combined the US News & World Report Rankings for Best National Universities and Best Liberal Arts College based off the overall score. I only listed those schools that (in the combined list) ranked in the top 50. US News uses the same criteria and weights for both lists, so why separate them in the first place? This is admittedly a simple way of combining the lists, but do people think it's relatively accurate and/or informative? If so, why not? I have my own opinions about the faults of this list but wanted to hear other people's opinions first.</p>

<p>Rank / School / Overall Score
1 Harvard University 100
1 Princeton University 100
1 Williams College 100
4 Yale University 99
5 Amherst College 98
6 Swarthmore College 96
7 Columbia University 95
7 University of Chicago 95
9 MIT 94
9 Middlebury College 94
9 Pomona College 94
9 Stanford University 94
13 Bowdoin College 93
13 Duke University 93
13 University of Pennsylvania 93
13 Wellesley College 93
17 Caltech 92
17 Carleton College 92
17 Dartmouth College 92
20 Haverford College 91
20 Northwestern University 91
22 Claremont McKenna College 90
22 Johns Hopkins University 90
22 Vassar College 90
25 Davidson College 89<br>
25 Harvey Mudd College 89
27 United States Naval Academy 88
27 Washington and Lee University 88
27 WUSTL 88
30 Brown University 87
30 Cornell University 87
30 Hamilton College 87
33 Wesleyan University 86
34 Colby College 84
34 Colgate University 84
34 Rice University 84
34 Smith College 84
34 United States Military Academy 84
34 University of Notre Dame 84
34 Vanderbilt University 84
41 Bates College 83
41 Grinnell College 83
43 Emory University 82
43 Macalester College 82
43 Scripps College 82
46 Bryn Mawr College 81
46 Oberlin College 81
48 Barnard College 79
48 Colorado College 79
48 Georgetown University 79
48 University of Richmond 79
48 University of California - Berkeley 79</p>

2

<p>Different strokes for different folks. This ranking would look very different for someone interested in, say, engineering…</p>

3

<p>comparing apples with oranges</p>

<p>the scores are all relative to those in each group so that they cannot be compared to each other.</p>

4

<p>BenFranklin understands. Basically, the scores for LACs are not interchangeable with Nat’l University scores.</p>

<p>Nevertheless, I’d be interested in a combined ranking by student/faculty ratio.</p>

5

<p>Combined LAC & Nat’l University rankings by student/faculty ratio:</p>

<p>1) CalTech 3/1
2) Stanford 5/1
2) Yale 5/1
4) Princeton 6/1
4) Columbia 6/1
4) Chicago 6/1
4) Rice 6/1
4) Penn 6/1
9) Harvard 7/1
9) Duke 7/1
9) Northwestern 7/1
9) Emory 7/1
9) Williams 7/1</p>

<p>14) MIT 8/1
14) Dartmouth 8/1
14) Vanderbilt 8/1
14) Swarthmore 8/1
14) Pomona 8/1
14) Wellesley 8/1
14) Haverford 8/1
14) Vassar 8/1
14) Harvey Mudd 8/1
14) USMA at West Point 8/1
14) USAFA Colorado Springs 8/1
14) Bryn Mawr 8/1
14) URichmond 8/1</p>

<p>27) Johns Hopkins 9/1
27) Brown 9/1
27) Cornell 9/1
27) USC 9/1
27) Tufts 9/1
27) Case Western Reserve 9/1
27) Amherst 9/1
27) Middlebury 9/1
27) Bowdoin 9/1
27) Carleton College 9/1
27) Claremont McKenna 9/1
27) USNA-Annapolis 9/1
27) Wesleyan 9/1
27) Hamilton 9/1
27) Wash & Lee 9/1
27) Oberlin 9/1
27) Smith 9/1
27) Grinnell 9/1
27) Mount Holyoke 9/1
27) Conn College 9/1
27) Skidmore 9/1</p>

6

<p>48) Brandeis 10/1
48) URochester 10/1
48) Lehigh 10/1
48) Colby 10/1
48) Bates 10/1
48) Macalester 10/1
48) Barnard 10/1
48) Colorado College 10/1
48) Bucknell 10/1
48) Holy Cross 10/1
48) Kenyon 10/1
48) Bard 10/1
48) Suwanee 10/1
48) Trinity College 10/1
48) Occidental 10/1
48) Union 10/1
48) Whitman 10/1</p>

7

<p>I don’t trust the student/faculty ratios, either, because they’re not counting the same things. At a LAC that has only undergrads it’s relatively easy to get a “true” student/faculty ratio: you just take the number of students and divide it by the number of faculty, and you get a ratio. There are still questions about whether and to what extent you count part-time faculty; US News says to count them at a factor of 3 to 1, i.e., it takes 3 part-timers to count as one “full-time equivalent.” Of course that fails to account for the fact that many part-timers don’t have offices or office hours, don’t advise undergrads, and probably aren’t terribly knowledgeable about or well connected within the school, so outside the classroom 3 part-timers probably don’t represent as much value to undergrads as one full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty member.</p>

<p>But when you move to research universities, it gets much more complicated. At many leading research universities, undergrads make up less than half the total number of students; there are more graduate and professional students than undergrads. Do you count only undergrads in the s/f ratio, or grad students as well? Do you count all faculty, or only those who actually teach undergrads? The common data set instructs schools to exclude faculty who teach in “stand-alone graduate or professional programs such as medicine, law, veterinary . . . (etc.).” OK, but what about the math professor who in principle could teach undergrads but in fact has taught only advanced graduate courses for the last 20 years? What about the professor who actually does teach both undergrads and graduate students but spends only half her teaching time with undergrads? It seems pretty clear many research universities are simply dividing their total number of undergrads by their total number of faculty (including part-timers at a fractional rate). So Penn, for example, in its 2011 common data set divides its undergrad student body of 9,604 by its total faculty of 1,663 (1,397 full-time plus 799 part-timers counted at 1/3 each, for another 266), and gets a student-faculty ratio of 6:1. But this ignores the fact that those faculty also need to tend to another 10,000-plus grad students. If you added up all the students on campus, graduate and undergrad, and divided by all the faculty on campus, Penn would have a student-faculty ratio of closer to 13:1. The claimed 6:1 ratio is not at all comparable to Williams’ 7:1 ratio because the Williams faculty doesn’t have its attention divided between graduate and undergraduate students, the way the Penn faculty does. </p>

<p>Apples to oranges.</p>

8

<p>I don’t trust the government, but we all have to deal with it. There are exceptions to exceptions. All I did was rerank according to a statistic that’s important to me. I think that professor research is important & universities tend to offer greater opportunities to their undergrads & graduate students to participate in these endeavors.</p>

9

<p>Agree with BClintonk. Additionally, even though a university might boast an excellent student to faculty ratio, the intro classes will still be large, whereas at a LAC, even though the student to faculty ratio may be, on paper, higher, the class sizes for the first two years will likely be smaller overall. </p>

<p>Take Oxford College of Emory University versus the Main Emory Campus. Though Oxford’s student to faculty ratio is actually higher than the Main Atlanta campus, the intro class sizes are much smaller. </p>

<p>Beyond the obvious criticisms of the US News rankings, comparing LACs to REUs given the US News’ methodology just doesn’t make sense. Almost one fourth of the ranking comes from academics’ perceptions about a school. If an academic is familiar with a LAC, it would likely be due to just being a brand name (Amherst, Williams, etc), being particularly notable for reasons other than solely academics (Barnard, West Point, etc), or producing quite a few students that end up going onto good grad programs (Reed, Carleton) Whereas if an academic is familiar with a research university, it’s probably because of the school’s research output, or overall reputation of the state.</p>

10

<p>In my opinion, the USNews rankings are a godsend. When I was college age, applying to universities & colleges was a crapshoot. Although not perfect, the USNews rankings are the best we have. I use them daily for both undergraduate & graduate admissions.</p>

11

<p>How about ranking the schools based on endowment fund (minus the medical schools)?</p>

12

<p>RML: Actually, that might imitate the USNews rankings. I love it, but this calls for two rankings–overall endowment & endowment per student.</p>

13

<p>You can post both rankings. But I’d be particularly interested in a ranking that excludes the medical school e-fund since most LACs do not own / do not operate a medical school.</p>

14

<p>I don’t have these rankings, although they are published yearly.</p>

15

<p>

</p>

<p>That’s fine. My only point was that it’s silly to combine LAC and research university student/faculty ratios, because they’re measuring very different things. Apples to oranges.</p>

<p>The closer I look at this, though, it’s clear there are also discrepancies within the research university category.</p>

<p>Compare Penn and Michigan’s 2011-2012 common data sets. In calculating its student-faculty ratio, Penn is counting only its 9,604 undergraduates as “students.” It has another 10,000+ graduate and professional students for a combined graduate-undergraduate enrollment of nearly 20,000. And in the denominator, it’s listing all its faculty; in box I-1(j), Penn claims as “0” the number of faculty “in stand-alone graduate/professional programs in which faculty teach virtually only graduate students.” Then, comparing its total number of undergraduates (9,604) to its total number of faculty (1,663), it comes up with a student-faculty ratio of 6:1. Nice. Never mind that the faculty figure includes a lot of law professors and medical school professors and perhaps some professors in other stand-alone graduate and professional programs that really shouldn’t be counted here. And that the “student” figure excludes all graduate and professional students.</p>

<p>Now look at Michigan’s 2011-2012 common data set. They show 373 full-time and 214 part-time faculty in “stand-alone graduate/professional programs”–presumably law, medical, and dental school faculty, among others. These are properly excluded from the student/faculty denominator. And in the numerator, they show 35,994 students–a figure that far exceeds the number of undergrads at Michigan (around 27,000) but falls well short of the total number of students at Michigan (about 42,000). I presume, then, that for purposes of calculating its student-faculty ratio Michigan is counting as students both undergrads and graduate students in non-“stand-alone” graduate programs, e.g., grad students in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, engineering, and probably even business (Michigan has an undergrad BBA program as well as a graduate-level MBA program). But it’s excluding both students and faculty in law, medicine, dentistry, and other graduate-only “stand-alone” programs.</p>

<p>Very different methodology. Using its methodology, Michigan comes up with a student-faculty ratio of 16:1. If it counted as Penn does–including only its undergrads in the numerator and all faculty in the denominator, Michigan’s student-faculty ratio would come out at slightly under 10:1. Not quite at Penn’s level, but a very respectable figure. And we don’t know what Penn’s student-faculty ratio would be if it counted Michigan’s way, but it surely would be much higher.</p>

<p>I’m not accusing Penn of cheating here. Maybe they were just careless, or misunderstood the directions. Maybe the directions are unclear and open to interpretation (though it’s hard to see how a university could conclude that its law and medical faculty weren’t teaching in “stand-alone programs”). Whatever the cause, however, it’s clear the student-faculty ratios at these two schools aren’t measuring anywhere near the same thing, making the data virtually worthless for comparison purposes.</p>

16

<p>Anybody got a ranking of them based on the shoe size of asst. women’s golf coach?</p>

17

<p>^ No, but I did find one based on the quality of the tap water.</p>

18

<p>Rank School Name Endowment/Student (Thoughts on Education Policy)</p>

<p>1 Princeton $2,192,964
2 Yale $1,655,756<br>
3 Harvard $1,616,553<br>
4 Pomona $1,090,035
5 Swarthmore $989,818<br>
6 MIT $919,234<br>
7 Amherst $914,491<br>
8 Grinnell $906,477
9 Williams $856,603<br>
10 Stanford $844,771
11 Caltec $814,882<br>
12 Rice $757,178
13 Cooper Union $667,181<br>
14 Wellesley $622,095<br>
15 Berea $606,779
16 Washington & Lee $560,576
17 Dartmouth $555,839
18 Notre Dame $521,981<br>
19 Richmond $518,848
20 UChicago $514,445
21 Bowdoin $513,175<br>
22 Smith $$459,212<br>
23 Claremont McKenna $425,067<br>
24 Emory $403,585
25 Trinity (TX) $398,357<br>
26 Duke $383,593 $19,180
27 Bryn Mawr $382,395 $19,120
28 Wash U $$382,065
29 Northwestern $370,455
30 Berry $360,586</p>

19

<p>I don’t think comparing universities and liberal arts colleges is exactly like comparing apples and oranges. I think there are many schools on the university list which really focus on undergraduate education and have goals more aligned with liberal arts colleges (i.e. Princeton, Dartmouth) and vice versa (i.e. Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna).</p>

<p>There are many other rankings (and lists, like the ones already posted on this thread) which also combine universities and liberal arts colleges, and many students may be applying to a mix of liberal arts college and universities for very good reasons. I think one consequence of splitting liberal arts college and universities is that high school students who are unaware of their differences may not even consider applying to liberal arts college or may consider them 2nd Tier (or below ANY university, since they come after the university list in the pages of US News). The point I was trying to make is that is an education at Amherst comparable to an education at Yale? Pomona to Stanford? Northwestern to Haverford? Smith to Vanderbilt? Or are these completely off?</p>

20

<p>I agree, gnat…I think what you’re saying is that the undergrad experience at a smallish national university (roughly less than 10,000 undergrads) might be more similar to the experience a liberal arts college than it is to that at a huge university. The people I know who went to smallish universities typically say they had small classes and were barely aware of grad students in their midst, which sounds more like the experience you’d get at an LAC with 2000 students than at a university with 25,000 undergrads.</p>